With the growth of image-guided interventions, it is getting better at guiding devices right to where the treatment needs to be applied. To date that has been resection or ablation. But a number of treatments require the delivery of an exact aliquot of a fluid such as chemotherapy, drug antibiotic, gene therapy, and so on, to a target of interest. The problem, however, is that the target is remote from the hands of the interventionalist. A long needle or tube has usually been used to deliver the fluid to the target, but there is a dead space within the needle or tube that wastes expensive materials. The longer the needle or tube is, the greater the dead space of wasted material is. Further, the needle or tube is tough to guide. In addition, the delivered amount of the fluid may be unknown. To control the amount of the fluid delivered from a drug delivery system, a flow regulator is usually utilized between the fluid reservoir and the target to regulate a flow rate of the fluid to the target. However, the use of the flow regulator unavoidably increases the design complexity, operative difficulty and cost of the drug delivery system.
Therefore, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.